Obama vows Fast and Furious action

President Barack Obama vowed Tuesday that federal officials who made bad decisions in designing or carrying out the controversial gun-running probe known as Operation Fast and Furious will be “held accountable.”

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’s investigation used a tactic known as “gunwalking” which reportedly allowed more than 1,000 weapons purchased under suspicious circumstances to flow unimpeded into the hands of Mexican drug cartels. The goal of the operation appears to have been to build cases against large-volume gun traffickers by tracing the routes cartels were using to obtain weapons from legal U.S. dealers. However, in many cases, there was little or no monitoring of the weapons once they were sold by the dealers to suspicious buyers.

“It’s very upsetting to me to think that somebody showed such bad judgment that they would allow something like that to happen,” Obama told ABC during a stop in his three-day bus tour of North Carolina and Virginia. “And we will find out who and what happened in this situation and make sure it gets corrected.”

The Arizona-based gun trafficking probe drew the attention of congressional investigators after two guns found at the scene of the killing of a Border Patrol agent last December were traced to the ill-fated ATF operation.

In a related development, the Senate voted Tuesday afternoon, 99-0, in favor of an amendment aimed at blocking funding for law enforcement operations like Fast and Furious. The proposal, offered by Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), would prohibit funding for probes that do not require continuous monitoring of weapons transferred to agents of drug cartels. It was attached to a bill including appropriations for the Justice Department

Attorney General Eric Holder has said the “gun-walking” technique violated standing Justice Department policy, though he has noted that the tactic was apparently used in at least one investigation conducted when George W. Bush was president. At Holder’s request, the Justice Department’s inspector general is examining how Fast and Furious was planned and carried out.

In the wake of the congressional outcry over the operation, there have been several moves to reassign ATF officials and prosecutors. However, only one person is known to have left the government over the episode: the top federal prosecutor in Arizona as the probe unfolded, U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke.

In May, William McMahon, the ATF’s deputy assistant director of operations in the West, was transferred to a headquarters job. In early August, William Newell and David Voth, ATF field supervisors in Phoenix who played key roles in designing Fast and Furious, were also reassigned to Washington.

Earlier this month, B. Todd Jones, Melson’s replacement, ordered a broad reshuffle of ATF management. He said the 11 new appointments, reaching as high as a new deputy director, were “aimed at refocusing the bureau’s direction on its core mission” following Fast and Furious.

At a White House press conference earlier this month, Obama expressed displeasure in terms similar to those he used Tuesday. Obama also declared his “complete confidence” in Holder and noted that the attorney general has said he didn’t know about ATF’s use of gunwalking.

“I think both he and I would have been very unhappy if somebody had suggested that guns were allowed to pass through that could have been prevented by the United States of America. He’s assigned an inspector general to look into how exactly this happened I’ve got complete confidence in the process to figure out who in fact was responsible for that decision and how it got made,” the president said on Oct. 6.